MacBook Pro Retina 15" Teardown

Editor: Staff Editor

We're going a bit teardown-crazy over here, but that's expected — everyone's trying to release their products just in time for Christmas. Today we have a tale of two MacBook Pro Retina teardowns, a 13" and a 15" variant.

Up first is the 15" model, which is essentially the 2012 unit with a couple of performance upgrades. We did a "quick-n-dirty" teardown on that machine, since very little changed in 2013. It scored the same terrible 1 out of 10 repairability; believe it or not, the machine became slightly *harder* to fix. Now people can't replace their headphone jack without replacing the logic board. So unless you're keen on soldering, replacing the headphone jack just became a $1,000 fix.
Note that this is now your only 15" option; Apple stopped selling the non-Retina 15" MacBook Pro.
Of more interest is the 13" version, which we're still working on. It has a completely reworked interior from what we saw last year, and we're working hard to note all the changes.

MacBook Pro 15" Retina Display Highlights:The 15" Retina now has a PCIe-based SSD instead of the mSATA drive of yesteryear. The new Samsung-based SSD contains the following ICs:

One of the few differences: It now has a sleekified heat sink with just a single thermal pad, thanks to the more closely integrated GPU — which we attribute to the "Haswellification" process, as we call it.
Apple added a new AirPort card that supports 802.11ac Wi-Fi.The Broadcom BCM4360 on this AirPort card enables operation on the 5 GHz band at speeds up to 1.3 Gbps, while a Broadcom BCM20702 Bluetooth 4.0 Processor gets Bluetoothy things done for your convenience. Also in residence are a pair of Skyworks SE5516 dual-band 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac WLAN front-end modules.